


Every Day, A Revolution

by riverbed



Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Gen, Modern AU, Trans Character, aww! the meaning of friendship, tangential hamilton/laurens
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-26
Updated: 2015-12-26
Packaged: 2018-05-09 10:11:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5535998
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/riverbed/pseuds/riverbed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Things change rapidly, sometimes too fast.</p><p>And change is messy, and your hands get dirty, but it's at least easier when you have good people in your corner.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Every Day, A Revolution

**Author's Note:**

> Hoo boy. So trans woman Lafayette makes complete and utter sense to me, and someone on tumblr wanted descriptions of a really feminine iteration of that headcanon. So here it is.
> 
> I've officially crossed the line and started writing RPF. Hamilton has done this to me. I hope you're proud of yourself, Lin.
> 
> Rating is just for swearing, passing mention of college-typical substance use and generally being sweet enough to make you sick to your stomach.

Every day brings something new.

Each day Lafayette studies herself in the full-length mirror, watching the way her jaw blends into her cheeks as she turns her head, the way the bulges of muscle in her calves have begun to soften.

Today she smooths the layers of her skirt down against her thighs, already slimmer than she remembers them being this past summer, when the board shorts she wore over her one-piece swimsuit hit at just the right spot so as to emphasize the thickest part of her legs and make her tug at them constantly, as if yanking them lower on her too-straight hips would have gained her a couple more inches of coverage if she’d concentrated on the wish hard enough.

A boy she had been sweet on for two years was at the pool party that day, a celebration John’s parents had thrown for the group’s graduation, and he had called her by her name, but not the name he had known her by before. “ _ Giselle _ ,” he had lilted, easily, his smile genuine and open, nothing like the sneers in the school hallways from the soccer team. He had leaned in close and enunciated her name perfectly,  _ Giselle de la Motier, Marquise de Lafayette,  _ and she had melted - he had even given her the proper title.

That was the day she had discovered hope, the day she first felt all right.

*

She remembers moving to America, how easily the group had accepted her, remembers being fascinated by the dynamics of their friendships.

Hamilton and Burr had fought constantly - they still do. Equals, intellectually, in high school constantly competing for roles in school productions and term paper grades alike. Aaron, the teacher’s pet, consistently edged out just barely by Hamilton, quietly ambitious, seemingly tireless, constantly journaling.

“What are you writing today, Alexander?” she asks now, as she finds the group at their usual meeting place on the lawn in front of the student union, a spot in the shade of a corner willow. The day is balmy and the warm breeze catches Lafayette’s skirt, wraps around her thighs above her socks like a whisper.

He smiles fondly. “Letter to a man in Charlestown who helped me a lot after Mom died. I’ve been wanting to get back in touch with him for a while.”

“Only you still handwrite correspondence, Hamilton.” Mulligan leans against the tree smoking, completely uninterested in the fact that at some point a campus officer will definitely pass by and confiscate the weed.

“What can I say? There’s something romantic about my own handwriting.”

Aaron glances up from his laptop to shake his head at him. “Absolutely typical,” he chides. “Herc, are you going to hog all of that, or are you going to help a guy get through this mind-numbing piece of shit paper?”

Burr offers the joint to Lafayette after he’s inhaled. She takes it between her middle and index fingers like a cigarette - feminine, the way she's seen Eliza do it - and leans her head on his shoulder as he goes back to typing, watching him struggle to piece together his thoughts on the judicial process.

“Why didn’t you guys tell me pre-law was a mistake?” He complains, deleting an entire paragraph.

Mulligan scoffs. “Pretty sure we did.”

“Whatever. I just can’t wait until I have room in my schedule to take stuff about civil rights.”

“There’s that rare glimmer of ambition,” Hamilton says without his pen so much as slowing.

Burr throws his empty soda can at him, and he dodges it with all the finesse of someone who’s spent half his life on a stage. He laughs, but doesn’t stop writing.

“Where’s Laurens?” Lafayette usually likes to change the subject before they get too far into it with each other.

“He had a frat thing,” Alexander says. “We were thinking of partying tonight when Burr and I get out of constitutional procedure if you guys are game.”

She agrees enthusiastically, ready to ring in the weekend with her friends. She thinks about how none of them ever even changed the way they said her nickname.

*

She goes shopping with Jefferson, because he has a good eye for color and because he’s not so hyperactive (Hamilton), so worried and distracted (Burr), or so aggressive (Mulligan) that it’s pleasant to simply walk the mall with him, sipping bubble tea through a neon straw and teetering on kitten heels. Nowhere does Lafayette feel more American than in a mall, the most grand experiment in capitalism of all. She and Jefferson sit at one of those stations with outlets so he can charge his phone, and she outlines her planned purchases at the next store.

“I want something slinky for that formal coming up,” she says, and then, shyly: “But I’m not sure I can pull it off.”

“Fuck pulling off," he says, without even looking up from his phone. "Wear what you want, what makes you feel most like yourself. That’s the only time something flatters, anyway.” Jefferson says it with such an easy smile that Lafayette believes it.

Hamilton and Burr will never understand her friendship with him, but it’s one of those relationships that are so honest, so natural, that they can go months without seeing each other (and often do - Jefferson attends Columbia, so their social lives are often separate excepting the phone) and fall right back into pattern, and when Lafayette sees him she feels like she did when she was 15 and had just moved here and he had found her in the locker room in tears because some idiot had made fun of her applying mascara - with Thomas, she felt safe.

The way he says her name now is admittedly with more affection, like he's trying to make her believe him every time he says it. She appreciates that.

*

Every day is practically a revelation.

Her curls lay perfectly, pulled down across one shoulder, and Eliza sprays them to lock in their bounce after finishing her eyeliner. “You look amazing,” Angelica says from the bed, nonchalantly, like it’s always been the truth.

She has to admit that she does. Eliza places her chin on her shoulder and gazes at her from behind, and she can always tell when Eliza sees beauty. The fact that she obviously sees it in her, right now, is a revelation Lafayette can’t quite bring herself to think about too deeply. But she has to admit she looks good - the pale peach color of the dress brings out the rosy cream rouge on her cheeks, and her caramel blond ringlets emphasize the whole porcelain doll thing. When she had first decided to transition, she had been jealous of the Schuyler sisters’ olive skin - makeup was so easy for them, such a non-question. But her skin is no longer dull, only pale.

Angelica has bought her a white fur coat for Christmas. She remembers laughing as she opened it last night at Alex’s apartment, the garment bag wrapped completely in flimsy red paper. Everyone in the room had gasped when she revealed it, and again when she had put it on - even Mulligan, for all his rough edges, had been rendered speechless.

She never expected to be the girl whose name rendered folks speechless.

And the Schuyler sisters sure know how to spend their money.

*

She goes to John’s fraternity’s winter formal in her blush-pink dress and gold curls and stiletto heels and fur coat and feels like her whole self for the first time since childhood, she assumes.

Not that she would dress like this every day. The shoes hurt after a while, but it’s a good sort of pain - she imagines her calves re-toning themselves, the HRT directing a different set of muscles toward prominence. A couple drinks down and she is floating, lying on a sofa and flirting shamelessly with Alex, who doesn’t mind, and John glances over fondly every once in a while from his place at the head of a game of cards on the floor, so she knows he doesn’t care either.

They trust each other, she realizes. Even Jefferson is there, across the room schmoozing with a grad student with bright green eyes and a ribbon tied in a bow in her hair, and he winks at her in acknowledgement because he knows better than to come near Hamilton when he’s drunk. But implied in that distance is trust, she knows, and respect - they deal with each other, they handle their lifelong rivalry in stride. They all do, picking their battles, like in Burr’s case, with his grief, or in Lafayette’s case, with the very concept of herself. They move through early adulthood in stories and conversations, just as they have moved through every stage of their lives together, which Alexander writes down and tucks away probably in a file somewhere, telling them knowingly that when they’re all famous he’ll publish the manuscripts and make them all doubly so - the inside scoop on the group of dynamo wunderkinds who overthrew the governments of three countries, or, I dunno, self-made a movie that united people the world over. And Lafayette feels like a movie star, the center of attention, Venus in furs.

Alexander knows a good story when he sees one.

As she lets herself be pulled away by a guy with too-long hair and a charming smile, she feels his eyes on her - she feels like history in the making.

**Author's Note:**

> feel-good gender fluidity song rec: [body was made by ezra furman](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQpnF1zBsgw)


End file.
